Duke loves Cal. His tournament failure with top talent the last decade takes some of the spotlight off how badly Duke has choked the last ten years
This doc is fairly interesting. Not sure if it's AI narrating, but a really good storyteller. It walks through the entire saga of Duke and how the brand began and built over time.
The doc walks through how K made a conscious effort to move from the standard K multi year kid, to the OAD around 2011, which started with Kyrie. If you look at his classes, they changed drastically. They were bigger and featured the NBA profiles. Almost half of K's McD AA's came after 2011. This coincides almost exactly with a couple things:
Calipari swinging from Memphis to Kentucky. Calipari was always an amazing recruiter, but you wonder with the UK brand behind him, if it scared K a bit into realizing he needed to go after the NBA stuff, not just the Jon Scheyer's of the world.
Was also after UNC won their second title in 4 years. That's always a lot of pressure on Tobacco road.
Self also won his in 2008.
That juncture between 2005 and 2010 was an interesting one. Cal to UK, Roy winning title at UNC, KU winning it's first title in ages. The Blue Blood heat was on. Calhoun was trying to keep up and it sank him into suspension and parole.
Wild when you look at it - since 2004, there have been 21 National Champions, 17 of those amongst 6 schools. (Kansas 2, Duke 2, UNC 3, Nova 2, UConn 5, Florida 3). UK/Louisville have their one each and then a couple random one off's: Virginia and Baylor. It really isn't that easy to win these things and a pretty exclusive club.